Coronavirus variant disrupts global shipping from China
SHANGHAI — Dozens of huge container ships have been forced to drop anchor and wait as stores in the United States and Europe find themselves with understocked shelves, higher prices or both.
The problem lies in Shenzhen, a sprawling metropolis adjacent to Hong Kong in southeastern China.
Global shipping has been disrupted by the pandemic for months, as Western demand for goods made in Asia has outstripped the ability of exporters to get their containers onto outbound vessels. But the problem in Shenzhen, the world’s third-largest container port, after Shanghai and Singapore, is making the difficulties even worse.
The shipping delays are related to the Chinese government’s stringent response to a recent outbreak of the virus. Shenzhen, a metropolis of over 12 million people, has had fewer than two dozen locally transmitted coronavirus cases, which city health officials have linked to the alpha variant first identified in Britain.
Shenzhen has responded by ordering five rounds of coronavirus testing of all 230,000 people who live anywhere near Yantian container port, where the first case was detected May 21. All further contact between port employees and sailors has been banned and the city has required port employees to live in 216 hastily erected, prefabricated buildings at the docks rather than going home.
The port’s capacity to handle containers plummeted this month. It was still running at 30% below capacity last week, the port announced, and state-controlled media said Monday that full recovery may require the rest of June.
Long lines of container ships awaiting cargo bound for North America, Europe and elsewhere have had to anchor off Shenzhen and Hong Kong as captains now wait as long as 16 days to dock at Yantian. Small vessels mounted with their own cranes have been ferrying many containers straight from riverfront factory docks in the Pearl River Delta to container ships near Hong Kong, as exporters try to bypass delays at Yantian.
“It looks like rush hour — there’s a lot of ships waiting,” said Tim Huxley, chairman of Mandarin Shipping, a container shipping line based in Hong Kong. He predicted that sorting out all of the shipping delays at Yantian and elsewhere could take the rest of this year.
The Suez Canal was blocked for almost a week in March by the Ever Given container ship, while Yantian coincidentally halted all loading of export containers for six days early this month. But Yantian’s problems have now dragged on much longer. Simon Heaney, senior manager for container shipping research at Drewry Maritime Research in London, said that the global transportation disruption caused by the Yantian port problems was similar to the Suez Canal blockage, although differences between the two incidents make any statistical comparison difficult.